As the national cyclospora outbreak spread, federal investigators traced infections to restaurants including Taco Bell, which sources its lettuce from Taylor Farms, one of America's largest produce suppliers, and a $1 million donor to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2025.
Then the sequence turned strange. On Thursday, July 16, Taylor Farms executives met with officials from the White House and the FDA. On Friday, the company issued a voluntary recall of iceberg lettuce from central Mexico after the FDA told it a product tested positive for cyclospora. By Sunday, Taylor Farms announced the agency had apologized: “Today, we were informed that FDA made a mistake, and this was a false positive... at this moment, FDA has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora.”
A positive test that becomes a retraction within days of a White House meeting with a million-dollar political donor invited exactly the questions it got. The administration denied any collusion, dismissing the reporting as “FAKE NEWS.” But NPR reported the FDA remains focused on Taylor Farms lettuce as the outbreak's likely source despite the retracted test, and the Daily Beast reported the company scrubbed its claim of an FDA apology as backlash grew. Whatever the test's truth, the public-health messaging around the country's worst cyclospora outbreak now runs through the political relationship between the White House and the company being investigated (see The CDC Cut Foodborne-Illness Monitoring From Eight Pathogens to Two, a Year Before a Cyclospora Outbreak Spread Faster Than It Could Track).
On September 11, 2026, the CDC issued its final update and declared the outbreak over. It was the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history: 12,883 people sickened across 21 states, 570 hospitalized and two deaths. The CDC's final notice linked the outbreak to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. At the peak, before the July 17 recall, more than 1,000 infections occurred in a single day; in August there were fewer than two a day on average. The FDA was still investigating how the lettuce became contaminated.